The next panel at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno that I’m attending is on social media platform practices, and it starts with a presentation by Steliyana Doseva and Danilo Harles, whose focus is on the handling of offensive content on social media. Social media provide many opportunities for communication, but this also includes the spread of problematic and offensive content. The EU Digital Services Act requires platforms to provide mechanisms for reporting such content, and to show how they address this content.
However, while the DSA creates a shared responsibility across the EU, contexts and reporting behaviours differ between national contexts. This study examines these differences, both in experiences and reporting of offensive content, and in satisfaction with platform responses to such reports.
This, then, addresses uncivil forms of online communication, including transgressions of social norms (politeness etc.) and public norms (antidemocratic and institutional). Under the DSA, both are included: legally actionable as well as platform norm-breaking behaviours. Reporting these is a problem-focussed digital coping response amongst others, which also include avoidance and emotion-focussed coping. The choice of such behaviour is based on an evaluation by the social media user, and might be affected by their overall platform engagement and literacy; their threat appraisal; and their perceived self-efficacy.
These might be translated into indicators: frequency of social media use for platform literacy; frequency of offensive content encounters for threat appraisal; and self-assessment of capabilities for self-efficacy. These were assessed here through survey data across Austria, France, Finland, Italy, and Spain, with respondents who have been personally insulted on social media platforms. They were asked about their reporting behaviour, satisfaction with reporting, social media use, repeated exposure to offensive content, and self-efficacy assessment.
Across all countries, reporting is not very common; only some half of all users across all countries every reported offensive content. This was lowest in Finland, with 54% never reporting. Digital literacy was a relevant factor in Austria, France, and Spain, while gender also mattered in Spain, and social media use in France. Patterns for Finland and Italy were not statistically significant. Satisfaction with reporting processes was rather mixed; only some 40% were quite satisfied (46% in France, less elsewhere). Finland stood out here as having the lowest reporting rate and no statistical significance; this is not explained by the sample structure itself.
Reporting seems to be shaped by local and national contexts, then, but digital literacy appears to be a factor across countries; this means that better and simpler reporting mechanisms might be beneficial here. Of course, non-reporting might still mean that users have other effective coping mechanisms; reporting is not the only possible reaction to offensive content, but it is an important one.
